My friends had already left for their day’s adventures. I was all alone. I started to cry, and I picked up my phone and stared at pictures of Claire’s kids. I have a family, I said to myself. I am okay. I have a life somewhere beyond here.
I pulled on clothes and walked outside, and the wind and the heat smacked me like an open palm to the face. I felt dehydrated and confused. I saw a woman I recognized from the day before. She was doing yoga. She looked very happy and relaxed. I was too nervous to approach her and say I need help, so I stared at the kids on my phone again and then started crying. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” I said to nobody in particular but close enough to the woman so that she could hear. “I want to be home.”
The woman paused her yoga and walked over and hugged me. She said, “Honey, honey, you’re home. You’re fine.”
* * *
Rwanda is so beautiful, but it is filled with too many people who believe they deserve only pain. I want to find another way. On my most recent trip there, I stayed with Uncle, a man who is not really my uncle but who in many ways is my truest family. He lives in Kigali, in a lovely home, with a stately front porch on which he likes to take his breakfast of fruit and sweet tea. His neighborhood is filled with well-kept gardens and smooth paved streets that look like the Berkeley Hills.
Above his dining table is a large framed wedding photograph: Uncle, handsome in his military uniform, holding the arm of his elegant third wife, who just passed away. That photograph is so sad and its presence gives me peace.
I hardly left Uncle’s house the five days I was in Kigali. When I did I mostly went to the Shokola Storytellers Café, on the top floor of the public library. The space was deep inside my comfort zone: furnished with dark wood floors, jute rugs, and clean-lined modern chairs and couches. You could sit on the roof deck, look over the green hills, eat little elegant mandazi, and drink single-origin coffee topped with latte art. But driving through the city upset me, all the buildings from before, all the new construction. Near Uncle’s house, on the hillside overlooking the farmland in Kigali’s central valley, was a huge new development, hundreds of new apartments, the architecture self-hating, charmless, and cold. The buildings were sterile white. The plan was for them to stay that way.
The design screamed out: You who live here do not deserve beauty. We who designed this are stunted, locked in, and ashamed.
One afternoon, while I was doing laundry, I lay on a blanket in Uncle’s garden while my clothes dried on a line. The sun felt rejuvenating. Some ants worked on a ledge in the shade, dismantling a fallen mango. Nearby was a yellow spider. I felt, at last, after all the hundreds of yoga classes I’d taken, like I’d finally exhaled. I was wearing a floral top, black with huge yellow and green flowers, and a bright yellow skirt. I stood out and I fit in, and I felt taken care of in a way that I felt taken care of nowhere else in the world. It had been so long since I felt like that—like a child, like someone else’s ward.
Throughout Rwanda now, the last Saturday morning of the month is reserved for Umuganda. This is an official government program to get Rwandans to clean up and take care of their country, the physical space, yes, and the scars of the past. Everybody is to come out of their houses and join with their neighbors to tend to their communities—to clean the streets, paint the schools, whatever is necessary.
It’s a beautiful idea, a gorgeous device of repair. And still the wounds are there and the history oozes. Everybody did and saw horrible things. No one can remove that from their eyes. The preachers say Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back on her wrecked city. The message in Rwanda, too, is: Forget, move on. But still the burnt ruins exist right there, smoldering.
On my most recent visit, the Umuganda project in Uncle’s neighborhood was to clear an overgrown field. People showed up in sneakers and windbreakers, smiling. They picked up and swung machetes, the tool all Rwandan families keep in their garages for gardening projects like this. Uncle didn’t blink. His neighbors didn’t blink. They’d grown accustomed to seeing machetes again. I had a hard time with Umuganda that morning. I could not bear the ghosts.
Later that day, a man named Vicki, who had lived in our neighborhood and been a friend of Claire’s nearly two dozen years before, picked me up in his Toyota at Uncle’s house. I said, “Let’s go to the new Marriott.”
He shook off the idea. “Oh no, that’s not a place where I go,” he said. “That place is only for rich people. I can’t go there.”
I knew the story in his mind. He didn’t have the right shoes. He wouldn’t fit in. He should stay in his lane. He didn’t deserve nice things. “Well, today we’re going to be rich!” I said. “Let’s go.” He drove.
We walked in. I ordered us tea. We logged into the wifi and hung out.
As we left I asked Vicki, “How did that feel?”
He said, “It felt so good.”
The night before I left Rwanda, Vicki picked me up again and drove me up a steep hillside. We stood on the side of the road, overlooking Kigali. The sun set, and it was beautiful—I knew this intellectually even if I couldn’t enjoy that beauty in my heart. The hills turned from green to blue to black, stacks and stacks of hills, a chain going on forever. Vicki pointed across the lowlands to a patch of blinking lights. He said, “That’s where we used to live.” I raised my phone and took pictures.
Back in his car, on our way home to Uncle’s house, Vicki steered us as close to our old neighborhood as he thought I could handle, down the busy street with men selling phone cards, the kids rolling bike tires with sticks, and the Muslim women wearing kitenges as head scarfs, the whole exuberant multicultural mashup of the world I’d lived in before the universe fell apart. Vicki idled the car in front of a corner shop with no sign, ran in, and returned with a brown paper bag of warm chapati, the oil just starting to seep through.
We ate and drove to the church where my parents got married. The chapati was so delicious, a sunrise, a warm bath in my mother’s backyard garden, then being wrapped in Claire’s perfect hand-me-down robe. The church looked the same.
* * *
A few months before that trip, on my twenty-ninth birthday, Ryan and I went for a walk in the Berkeley Hills, on a trail that runs through my favorite park. We started to talk about getting married, but I could not live in that fairy tale. That story line, to me, was about possession—to have and to hold, until death do us part.
Humans are not meant to be possessed.
Ryan also loved me more than I loved myself, and I could not tolerate that. I pushed him away. I needed to learn to hold my own pain. I needed to figure out how to embrace my darkest corners, and when I returned from my trip to Rwanda, he was gone. We’d been coming unglued. My excavation of the past and my constant travel were not easy to live with, and now he’d taken everything. I had told him, many times, that being left was one of my deepest fears. I had always been so scared that Claire would leave me, that one day she’d just get up and hustle off if I wasn’t good enough or fast enough, if I didn’t follow the rules.
The first thing I noticed, when I entered the apartment and set down my big black suitcase, was that Ryan’s guitar was gone. He kept it propped on a stand in the living room by the TV. The guitar wasn’t there, the stand wasn’t there. I walked into our bedroom. I noticed his phone charger—good. Ryan needed his phone charger. He could not have left. But the door to our closet was wide open. Ryan’s shirts were all missing.
All my fears rushed into the room. Shit, shit, shit, the stealing, the faces, the water, the bodies. It all rushed in.
I stood in my bedroom and tried to breathe. I reminded myself: I live here. I’m home.
21
I was constantly yearning for mothers, cultivating backup and replacement mothers. I’d never really given mine a shot. Even as an educated, worldly adult, I didn’t know how to make the relationship work.
So I invited my mother on a trip with me to Europe. I would restage our reunion. Last time the set and the surprise plot twist were all wrong, out of our control. No one had asked me, And what do you think happened next? This time I would do it better.
My mother and I hadn’t spent time alone together in twenty years. I flew to London ahead of her. I wanted everything to be perfect—every detail thoughtful and wondrous, like the egg filled with glitter that I’d received as an invitation from a secret society in college. The shell had been hollowed out and refilled with gold sparkles, and in the center was a tiny note. I wanted to give my mother a gift like that. I wanted to invite her to that reunion.
Before my mother arrived, I walked to the West Brompton grocery store and bought fruit, bread, milk, tea, eggs, rice, and a chicken. I bought a bouquet of wild roses and arranged them in a vase next to her bed. On the coverlet I laid out the white nightgown and robe I’d brought along for her as gifts, and in the closet I hung the new wardrobe items I’d purchased for her: two new blouses, two new dresses, a few scarves and skirts.
I wanted my mother to feel special. I wanted her to know her worth. I wanted people to smile at her with great approval whenever she walked into a room.
* * *
I took the train back to Gatwick to meet my mother’s plane. I waited and waited in the entrance hall. My mother didn’t show. Finally I called her. She was lost. She didn’t know the way, so she’d just sat down.
I asked her to pass her phone to a nearby stranger, any stranger, so I could ask this person to please show my mother out. I felt so guilty, so irresponsible. I had not given my mother the address of the West Brompton house. She had never traveled on her American passport and never alone.
At last she emerged, the final person to exit customs from her flight. She was wearing new jeans and carrying a sparkly new bag. Her hair was tightly braided and her nails freshly painted. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said, over and over. I called us an Uber. A fancy black car arrived.
“Goodness! Clemantine!” my mother said. On the drive into the city she held her face in her hands, tugged her thumbs, and fell asleep.
She loved the nightgown. She loved the robe. She loved the flowers. She loved the clothes. I rubbed the essential oils I’d packed on my mother’s feet. She settled into a nap. When she woke and walked downstairs, a white housekeeper was in the kitchen. The owners of the flat had sent the housekeeper to check on us.
“Does that woman live here?” my mother asked when she left.
I said no and pointed to a picture of the black family who did.
My mother looked so confused.
* * *
I had mapped everything out—how long each bus ride would take, where we’d get on and off. I took my mother to Westminster Abbey. I found the life-size effigies creepy but my mother loved them. The dead had been chiseled with such serene faces. Some had their hands over their hearts, others had hands pressed in prayer. They were with God.
I planned to show my mother the Infirmarer’s Garden. I’d learned online that it once had been planted with roses, lilies, beans, onions, and fruit trees. Now the garden had only green grass that nobody was allowed to step on. A sign said it was closed.
I approached a guard and told him our story: I’d planned this whole trip with such care, my mother and I hadn’t spent time alone together in twenty years. The point of my story was: This moment is important, essential even. I was telling him and myself: This moment is essential. It will glue us back together. It will glue me back together. I still felt broken inside.
The guard let us in. There was something eerie about all this spiky grass on which no one ever walked. My mother started touching all the cobblestones. She wanted to feel and grab everything, every paver, rock. I did not want to be alone with her.
The next day we toured more cathedrals. We visited shops, we tried on clothes. Back in the apartment, for dinner, I roasted the chicken I’d put in the refrigerator and my mother did the dishes. I told her she could leave them for the housekeeper, that the housekeeper would be paid to do them, but my mother insisted. She washed the dishes so slowly that I could not stand to watch. She did not know how luxurious and indulgent it looked to me to wash dishes at that pace. My life did not involve doing chores calmly, as if there was peace.
I felt so overwhelmed to be with just my mother in this apartment, to try to create a whole world from the meager shreds at hand. I wanted my mother to know all the places I’d been, all the horrible things I’d seen, all the scrubbing I’d done in miserable camps, the unthinkable variety of suffering I’d witnessed just to fight my way here, to be in this apartment, to bring her that new white nightgown and white bathrobe. But I didn’t want to tell her about my experience. Neither Claire nor I had ever told her our story. I’d never shared even the cleaned-up version I told in public. I’d never felt I could. I still could not now. I felt so furious at myself. I kept shouting in my mind: Mom, you have no idea.
* * *
We took a train to Paris. I found the best croissants. I found the perfect strawberries, the small ones with the green stems attached. I took my mother to quaint boutiques. She stood in front of a three-way mirror and admired a green brocade coat. Then, just as she started admiring herself in it, she gasped at the price and nervously returned the coat to the rack. I bought it for her anyway. I wanted her to believe that she deserved the best coat in the world.
Later that day we attended a lovely lunch at a friend’s house. My mother was pampered and catered to—“Would you like fish? Would you like lamb? Would you like that lamb cooked medium rare? Oh, what a lovely coat you have!”
I was trying so hard. The itinerary I’d created was working according to plan, but I had not planned for these feelings. I felt profoundly alone. My mind and my heart seemed disconnected, both underwater, all the communication signals between them distorted and dampened.
My mother and I walked through the Tuileries Garden. She wrinkled her brow, unimpressed by the lazy French planting and pruning. I tried, for a moment, to close the gap between the present and the past, to come out from under the water and speak to her in the clear air.
“Do you miss your own garden?” I asked. A softball, I thought, the easiest possible question to ask about our past lives together, about before.
The life drained from my mother’s face. She did not answer.
* * *
We continued on, to the Louvre. My mother’s favorite images, like her favorite stories, were from the Bible. She had a picture of white Jesus on her phone case—ivory skin, blue irises, smooth hair. I wished my mother would see beyond this simple, innocent face. I wished she could see how people had wielded that face to brainwash others, to destroy cultures, to eliminate entire languages, to cause so much degradation and pain. Earlier that day we’d walked by the most gorgeous Senegalese and Nigerian men selling little Eiffel Tower pens and key chains by a metro station. In their eyes you could see they’d suffered as much as my mother’s Jesus. Why not pray to them?
The crowds in the museum carried us toward the gallery with the Mona Lisa. The space was so packed with humanity. I tried to find the edge of the swarm but failed. I’d hated crowds since our first walk, behind the Red Cross trucks, to our first refugee camp. At a huge painting called The Wedding Feast at Cana, I said, “Mom, stop.”
The Wedding Feast at Cana depicts a feast, a meal for royalty, and around the table sit Jesus, the apostles, kings, queens, and emperors. They are all alabaster, apparently pure. Everyone whose skin is even a little bit shaded, or who is not well dressed, is either serving those eating or is under the table.
I asked my mother what she saw in the painting.
“That’s Jesus right in the middle,” she said. “That’s Jesus and Mary and the apostles at a feast—a wedding feast.”
“What else?” I asked, now slightly causti
c. “What does it look like to you?”
“It looks like heaven,” she said.
“But, Mom, what is that about, that idea of heaven? Who is it for? See that boy? See that little black boy?” I pointed to the bottom of the painting. “He’s under the table, next to the dog.”
“What about that boy?” my mother asked.
“He’s not sitting at the table! He’s with the dog! That painting is telling him his place. I want him at the table, sitting next to Jesus.”
I was now screaming. My mother held my hand, calm.
* * *
We flew to Rome. I was done. My mother complained that her legs hurt. Every moment, every image felt like an omen—a bird flying across the sunset, making a glamorous exit; a woman riding a bike with her baby on the back. The woman hit a distracted pedestrian and fell.
I did not know what I thought would happen on this trip. Perhaps I thought we’d become different people, people untouched by loss. I wasn’t even sure who I was trying to be, or become. I’d brought my mother clothes. I’d prepared her food. Clearly I wanted to flip the script, be the mother for her she hadn’t been for me.
Yet I was also old enough to know that when you lose a mother at age six, part of you always remains a child, stays frozen as that girl wanting to jump onto her lap, yearning for her approval and for the false reassurance that she can protect you from the world.
I knew none of that would come true.
In Rome I became preoccupied with my mother recognizing my effort, with her seeing how well I’d planned this trip, thanking me for it. She’d communicated that she was grateful, but she kept praising God. God gave us these gifts. God created this moment. God made you and me.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 21